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Charles F. Zabriskie Collection

This collection, by amateur photographer Charles Frederick Zabriskie (1848-1914) encompasses photographs showing life in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century in Cooperstown, New York and surrounding towns, over more than two decades. The daily life of his family, Cooperstown residents and summer leisure were also popular subjects for Zabriskie’s work. The collection encompasses approximately 8,000 photographic prints, mostly recorded in albums made by the photographer. Zabriskie was an experimental artist, delving into many types of printing processes and toning techniques that were emerging at the time.

After many visits to Oswego and Richfield Springs, New York, in 1898, Charles F. Zabriskie and his family purchased a summer estate on Lake Road in Cooperstown named “Glimmerview.” A family home was also maintained on the upper west side of Manhattan during these years. Charles and Minnie Zabriskie had two children, Anita Louise and Charles Lemaire. Much of what is known about this collection is the result of several interviews of Charles Lemaire Zabriskie by a 1980s graduate of the Cooperstown Graduate Program, Charles L. Sachs. Additional work was completed on Zabriskie and the photographic collection by Daniel F. Fink in a manuscript written in the 1990s. As stated by Fink in his introduction, “That Charles F. Zabriskie wished to document the people who surrounded him in life and the places and things which gave him so much joy in life is certain there is much more to his photographic efforts than preservation. Above all he was conscious of the creative impulses being felt in photography…such as composition, texture, lighting and aesthetics of the purely photographic….”